


Dichotomous

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 21:17:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21087974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: A light beams from the porch of the little house; a beacon in the night.





	Dichotomous

Their cars are conspicuous in the nearly empty parking lot, which magnifies the free-floating uncertainty. What passed between them in the church bears a sacramental weight, but the practical realities must be addressed. Scully coughs and kicks at a crumbling speed bump.**  
**

Two cars, two choices. Two lives, two choices.

“So,” Mulder says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He cleans his glasses on his jacket.

“So,” she echoes, looking about. She has felt furtive again since the little drones followed them, uncomfortable vocalizing even small bits of information. Always heard, always watched. So much of why she demanded more for William. Of why she had fled.

“I said a prayer, but I don’t know how this works,” Mulder reminds her. “Do we await divine intervention?”

Scully smiles at him, reaches out to take his hand. She doesn’t look around first. “I was hoping I could get a lift.”

He squeezes her fingers. “You going my way, Red?”

“That’s how it ends,” she says.

***

They’re three miles out before he speaks. “You said you wanted to come home, to have a life and family with me. But what does that mean, Scully? What can that mean for us?”

These are the prosaic details that always trip her up. “I don’t really know. For starters, I’m listing my hell-house as soon as the insurance claims are processed from the fire.”

“Supported. That place is creepy, and I feel that your fridge takes a flippant tone.”

“So I’ll need a new address.”

Mulder smiles at her with gentle eyes. “You’re still on the title. No need to wait. Or ask.”

“I don’t want to wait. But of course I had to ask.”

He lets that pass. “And the rest of it? A family? We had a version of this conversation not terribly long ago, and I’m still not clear on the resolution. I mean, based on current data, unprotected sex isn’t going to result in any surprises, though I’m happy to continue field testing.”

She smiles, presses her open palm to the chilly window. Her reflection ghosts along the landscape. “You’re a hero to the scientific community.”

“But seriously. What did you mean by a family? Are you talking IVF again, Scully? You said William was a miracle, but I still think that ship had something to do with it.” He puts his blinker on and changes lanes for the highway ramp.

The ship, the ship… Africa and Antarctica and Mulder’s captors and her father sailing in and out. There are pieces of her scattered through the seas and stars; it’s no wonder she can’t stay still. Scully stares at the fabric lining of the cabin roof as though it may hold answers, then rubs her face with her hands. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” he says.

Silence for a mile, her favorite retreat. But she promised.

Scully rests her hand on his thigh. “Maybe William reaches out to me and we can offer him the security we couldn’t at first. Maybe it’s just you and me and a Christmas puppy. I don’t know, maybe we take in some other kid whose parents couldn’t give them the life they deserved; I have no real plan. Not IVF, that’s not... no. But I want the banality of laundry and groceries and lawnmowers. With you.”

He strokes her knuckles with his thumb, looking ahead. “So your grand prayer boils down to undetermined domestic mediocrity with a nearly-retired crackpot pushing sixty?”

“I think that’s always been my grand prayer. I just didn’t know it.” She doesn’t dwell on all the time she has wasted. It feels like standing at the edge of a cliff.

“Is that why you whispered it,” he teases. “Too ashamed?”

She closes her eyes for a beat, swallows hard. “Pull over,” she orders.

He looks at her, shocked. “Scully, I was kidding, I -“

“Pull over.”

He merges onto the shoulder, puts the car in park and turns his hazards on. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-“

Scully unbuckles her seatbelt and turns to give him her full attention. His pupils are wide, irises a mossy green. “I whispered, Mulder, because speaking directly to God hasn’t gotten me anywhere lately. You said you spoke to Him through me, and it seemed like a sentiment worth returning. I whispered to the one person I knew was listening.” Her voice is raw, her throat achy, but she presses ahead with a wry smile. “I prayed to you, Saint Fox of the Long Shot, for my salvation.”

His eyes shine and they burn her.

She wants to run. Run from the car, run from his eyes, down the highway into the protective cover of the dark. But she stays. She stays in the piercing silence.

“I can only give you sanctuary and unconditional love,” he tells her at last. “You have to save yourself.” He offers an apologetic frown.

Scully exhales another little demon, grateful that Mulder has promised nothing bold. “Then my prayer was answered,” she says.

***

The gravel clatters up against the fenders as the car bumps down his - their - pitted driveway. A light beams from the porch of the little house; a beacon in the night. They haven’t spoken since merging back onto the highway, just interlacing their fingers until they are white-knuckled and sore. Nick Cave has been playing in the background. 

Mulder turns the engine off, and they step out into the cricket noise and owl calls. The earth smells damp. Fecund.

Scully jams her hands in her pockets, cants her face to the broad sweep of the heavens. “It’s always so beautiful here, without the light pollution. I can see so many more stars.”

Mulder walks around the car, rests his chin on the crown of her head. “Oh, no,” he says wrapping his arms around her. “It’s not the light pollution. I had extras brought in special for you.”

She can almost believe him.

They stare up for a while, naming constellations, telling each other the myths behind them. Scully loves all the ways people make sense of the universe.

A chill wind comes, driving them up the steps. Scully reaches for her keys, yelping when she is scooped up in Mulder’s arms. Her shoes dangle precariously from her toes, then drop to the floor with two solid thuds.

He fumbles at the lock, pushing the door open with his shoulder. “Welcome home,” he says, and carries her over the threshold.

“Mulder,” she says, arms about his neck. “Put me down.”

He kicks the door shut. “I got this, presbyopia and all.” Navigating around a pile of mail and a pair of discarded sneakers, lurching up the staircase. Her toes clip the balusters, but she says nothing.

“I used to do this all the time,” Mulder huffs at the landing. “Hauling you around Antarctica, whatever.”

She winces at a banged ankle. “All the time? Let’s not be dramatic, John Wayne.”

“Hush,” he says.

Scully peers down the hallway when they make it to the second floor. This is her home again, this is their bedroom he’s carrying her to. She has no car, she has no exit strategy. This is the last choice. Her universe keeps splitting to circle back here.

She rests her head against his chest.

Mulder drops her unceremoniously on the bed, stretches his shoulders and back out. “Time was I could bench press you.”

“Time was,” she says fondly, shrugging out of her jacket. “Mulder, the bed is made.”

He looks sheepish. “Well, you got me used to it. I remember most days.”

Her heart squeezes and expands.

“Anyway,” he says. “Here we are.” He sits next to her on the bed, bouncing slightly.

Scully crawls over, rests her head in his lap, facing his belly. The scent of him wraps around her, protective and comforting. She should have smudged her house with him, like sage smoke, to purge the ennui. She should have done so much.

Mulder twines his fingers through her hair, through her sharp bob, and she laughs again at his only just noticing.

“Laughing’s a little harsh,” he says, then twitches himself against her cheek.

“That is the opposite of sexy,” she says, sitting up.

He frowns at his lap. “Years of pornography have assured me otherwise.”

Scully shoves him, then wraps her arms around his bicep.

“I’m sorry I just noticed your haircut,” he murmurs against her scalp. Maybe he really can hear her thinking.

“Oh,” she says, tucking a strand behind her ear. “This old thing?”

He kisses the top of her zygomatic arch. “In the church, I had all these assumptions about you, about how you were feeling and your regrets and your beliefs, but I was totally wrong, Scully. I was projecting my own issues onto you. I just wonder what else I haven’t seen.”

“Don’t be silly,” she whispers.

“Get up,” he says.

She presses her cheek more tightly against his arm. “Mmm, no.”

He shakes her shoulder gently. “Scully, get up.”

Scowling, she does, the floor chilly beneath her bare feet. “What?” she demands, her arms crossed. She sees them in the mirror above the dresser, sees her sharp white face and Mulder’s spiky hair.

He sits at the edge of the bed with his knees apart. He hooks his fingers into her waistband, tugs her close.

“Mulder.” She hears the huskiness in her own voice. The woman in the mirror has half-lidded eyes, and Scully turns so that they cannot look at each other.

Mulder puts his glasses on, takes his jacket off. He returns his hands to her hips.

Scully gazes down at him for a long moment. She is tensed, as though he really may be able to look inside her in some way. After another second of hesitation, she pulls her shirt over her head, stands before him in her bra and trousers. “Tell me what you see in me.”

He slides his hands from her shoulders to her wrists. He touches the white rose of the gunshot wound on her belly. “Scars,” he says. “And strength.”

She takes a long, shivery breath through her nose. “I’m not whole, you understand. There are wounds in me that still bleed. I don’t know if they can all heal. I need to know that you can accept that possibility.”

His dips his forehead against her belly, and she furrows her nails into his hair. “Our needs exceed my grasp,” he mumbles, his breath ticklish at her navel. “But I lit a candle for them. I meditated on them. And, as I said, I believe in you.”

“A little extra light in the world is never a bad thing anyway,” she says, tracing his earlobe.

“Wounds aren’t always bad either,” he says, and looks up. “They’re where the light gets in.”

Gooseflesh rises on her skin, though not on the cicatrix of Ritter’s miscalculation. Her own miscalculation. She understands now how terrible eternity would be, and cups Mulder’s face in her hands. Thumbs his temples, thinks of his wondrous brain having been exposed to Earth’s corrosive air.

Scully pulls his glasses off. “I see you too,” she says.

“I know.” There is the sweetest sadness in his eyes.

She unfastens her trousers, letting them slip to the floor. In her bra and underwear, she climbs onto the bed, resting her head on the pillows. She wriggles beneath the blankets. “Lay down.”

He does, stretching out on his side to face her. One forefinger traces her lips and she catches it in her teeth. He pulls it free to draw her eyes, the slope of her nose. “Someone should paint you,” he says. “Like Botticelli or Sargent.”

She blushes, pleased. Bites his finger again.

“Maybe I’ll take up painting in my forthcoming retirement,” he muses.

She unbuttons his shirt, pushes it open to plane her hands over his torso. His body radiates warmth, as it always has. His skin is the color of graham crackers.

Mulder shrugs out of his shirt. She kisses the place where she shot him, the tight pucker of tissue that mirrors her own. “I think that’s when I fell in love with you,” he says. “Not every woman will blow a hole through your soft tissue for your own safety.”

“Good thing I’m a hell of a shot.”

“Good thing I’m a fucking idiot.” He strips the rest of his clothing off before joining her under the bedding.

Scully tucks her head beneath his chin, and he wraps his arms around her. She tangles her legs through his, trailing butterfly kisses along his neck. She sniffs him again, happy.

“Let’s get a puppy when it’s warmer,” he suggests. “I’ll install an invisible fence.”

She imagines the entropic potential of this plan. “Mulder, I need to know now if you plan to get some pathetic, one-eyed, three-legged, Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of an animal.”

“Obviously.” he says, tracing circles at the small of her back.

She unhooks her bra and maneuvers out of it. Slips her underwear down.

Mulder draws her closer still, pressing her breasts against the heat of his chest. “You’re very soft,” he says. “I remember the first time I had my hands on you like this, I thought how soft you were.”

“Even badasses have to moisturize.” She strokes his nose.

He kisses her, arms around her waist. His tongue is hot and rough against her lips.

Incentive salience perks up her nucleus accumbens, drives her hips against his. Mulder shifts his weight and she’s on her back, his knees parting her thighs.

“Hi,” he says. His erection bumps her pubic bone.

She pokes it with a fingertip. “Hi.”

He eases his body into hers, watching her watch him. Her skin feels like it’s been rubbed down with sandpaper, her mechanoreceptors aflame. Scully sighs, raising her hips for a better angle. Mulder tips forward, his hands on either side of her shoulders. She locks her heels at his caudal spine.

“This is why we’re good together too,” he says into her neck. He tongues the hollows of her clavicles.

She murmurs assent, pushing her shoulders into the pillows; whispers nonsense and encouragement into his ear. Sweat slicks the places there their bodies touch and Scully, her hair damply tangled, kicks the comforter away. The cool air sharpens her.

His fingers between them and colors swim behind her eyelids, reds and golds and swirling black. Mulder’s touch is practiced, insistent, and her thighs begin to tremble. She wants it to slow down, she wants to savor this more, then remembers she has nowhere else to be.

She prays to him again, and he answers that one too.

Mulder sucks hard at the tender skin beneath her ear, the fleshed bruised and branded. Scully, panting and sated, rakes her nails down his back and thinks of the countless times they’ve had sex in this bed. The times they’ve made love and and the times it was nothing more than self-destructive fucking.

Mulder’s eyes are closed, his shoulders straining. His hair brushes her forehead as he shudders, groaning. She strokes his neck, presses his weight against her. It wasn’t the ship that made their son. It wasn’t God. It was this, it was this.

Several moments pass, then Mulder rolls to the side, leaving her chilly and exposed. She burrows back under the blankets, against his chest. His heart drums against her and she remembers their roles reversed, his ear at her belly when William was inside it.

“I remember when we bought this house,” she says. “The real estate agent was so confused that we even wanted it.”

Mulder laughs, kisses her forehead. “She told me I owed you a new bathroom if I planned to make you move in.”

“She asked if we planned to have kids,” Scully recalls. “She said the third bedroom wasn’t big enough.” The question had gutted her, but she’d smiled through her careless shrug, said it would make good storage.

“There are lots of ways to make a house into a home,” Mulder says.

Scully props herself up on one elbow, surveys the familiar landscape of Mulder’s face. The terrain is more rugged now. “If I had to chastise a version of myself, it wouldn’t be the woman who walked into your office. It would be the woman who walked out of your bed.”

“You’re here now,” he says softly.

She smoothes his hair, rubs his stubble with her cheek. “Do you think he’ll come back?”

“Yes,” Mulder says, without hesitation. “He’s his mother’s son.”


End file.
